A wall of police in Vienna, Austria guards Syrian migrants at a train station.

Headlines last week about 71 people, including eight women and three children, found dead from asphyxiation in an abandoned truck outside Vienna were shocking, but becoming all too familiar.

European Union nations are scrambling to handle a massive influx of refugees from the war-torn nations of Syria and Iraq.

But for folks here in Texas, these headlines aren’t so different than the ones in our own hometown newspapers a year ago.

Instead of abandoned trucks and make-shift boats, our southern border was experiencing mass amount of asylum seekers from Central America, fleeing drug violence and risking their lives by hopping on the freight train named “La Bestia.”

Demetrios Papademetriou talks to the Standard about issues of migration here in the US, where he is President Emeritus of Migration Policy Institute, and in Europe, where he is currently president of the Migration Policy Institute.

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